Developing Excellence —
Beyond Tax
It starts with the moment the buffer disappeared. It ends with you designing what replaced it.
A practitioner programme in tax technology, real-time tax and AI in tax — for the people who have to design the systems, approve the architecture and answer for the output.
Value has moved elsewhere in tax — from labour to capability. The shift came from two directions at once.
For thirty years, headcount scaled with transactions. Value was counted in returns filed, reconciliations cleared, deadlines survived. Careers were built on carrying more of it than the person beside you.
The authorities moved first. Under clearance and real-time reporting, the return became a by-product of a transaction your systems already transmitted. The buffer between the transaction and the authority — the weeks in which mistakes were quietly found and fixed — now closes at the speed of the transaction itself.
AI moved second. The work that scaled with headcount is precisely the work that automates first.
The work that remains is different in kind — measured by the quality of the design and judgement it demands.
Automating now
- Extracting and normalising transaction data
- First-pass reconciliation and exception triage
- Preparing returns from data already structured
- Standard determination against a rules table
Staying with you
- Deciding what correct means before a system can enforce it
- Designing an architecture that survives successive mandates
- Choosing a provider, and holding it accountable for what it delivers
- Owning the outcome when the system executes perfectly on whatever inputs it was given
Tax technical knowledge remains essential, and the job now asks for more alongside it. Read any senior tax technology role description and count what it asks for. A dozen capabilities recur; tax is one of them. The wider argument, from AI-enabled finance to real-time tax and the professional both require, is set out in Careers of Tomorrow.
Taught as practice.
A structured practitioner programme, taught in cohorts, covering tax technology, e-invoicing and real-time tax, AI in tax, and the data obligations now reaching into direct tax, transfer pricing and the global minimum.
Two books sit behind it, doing different jobs. Extinction of Tax As We Know It follows a transformation programme through a vendor selection scoped in haste, a data failure that surfaces three reporting streams later, a boardroom fluent in finance and new to tax, and a crisis. It is the story. Real-Time Tax Transformation in Enterprise Systems is the practitioner text behind it — the architecture, the governance, the frameworks. It is the theory.
The programme is the practice.
You are assessed on what you would have built.
Built for people who already know tax.
Tax managers to directors
In-house or advisory, being asked to approve architecture on someone else’s word, and to sign off on positions a system produced.
Practitioners facing a mandate
Whose jurisdiction has moved to clearance or real-time reporting, and whose ERP was built to carry accounting, and now must carry tax meaning.
Anyone watching the work change
Whose team’s output is being automated underneath them, and who intends to be the person designing what replaces it.
The tax is assumed. Every scenario hands you the position and asks what you would have built around it. Working experience in at least one substantive tax is the starting point.
Nitin Agarwal
Two decades in indirect tax and tax transformation across India, the UAE and beyond. Named International Tax Review’s EMEA In-House Indirect Tax Leader of the Year. Author of Extinction of Tax As We Know It and Real-Time Tax Transformation in Enterprise Systems. Founder of Contiqa Systems.
The frameworks taught here come from practice. They were named after watching the same failures repeat across enough organisations to be certain they were structural — and after being accountable for the outcome each time.
The first cohort opens shortly.
Places will be limited, and applications reviewed individually — a cohort is partly made by who is in it. Register your interest and you will hear first, with the full syllabus, dates and fees before they are published anywhere else.
This form registers interest only. Enrolment and fees open later, and course delivery is subject to applicable regulatory approvals.